From zero to a new car brand

"Be given a project without requirements, no architecture, no documentation, globally distributed teams, and a newly started R&D center; have product management and stakeholders issue a warning: deliver on time with quality or face serious consequences; then bring in brilliant people, empower them, and launch agile practices with supporting tooling."

The above "User Story" exemplifies the situation CEVT Power-train Engineering faced at the beginning of 2016. Today, a totally new car brand, Lynk & Co, has been launched in China, which will target EMEA and the Americas in the near future. How was this possible in such a short time?

The recipe was:

  • Bring in good people and empower the teams
  • Apply agile practices (Scrum and Kanban)
  • Bring in tooling to support development (Continuous Integration)
  • Test, test, and test

Orchestrating agile teams is not a "walk in the park", but with good leadership and motivated people together with supported tooling, almost any challenge that is near chaos can be turned into a success.

 

Azin Akbari

Azin Akbari (China Euro Vehicle Technology AB)

Azin Akbari is Director of the Control Software Development Group within the Powertrain Engineering department at CEVT. She graduated from the University of Gothenburg with a Master of Software Engineering and has worked in the software industry for about 14 years. She started as a Scrum Master in the software development team at CEVT in 2015 and is now a director. One of her goals is to have the team practice agile methods in the best way possible.

 

Markus Niklasson

Markus Niklasson (China Euro Vehicle Technology AB)

Markus Niklasson is Software Developer (Tools & Integrations) and Scrum Master (Basic Software) at CEVT Powertrain Engineering Software Controls & Calibrations. Having spent 15 years in the software industry, Mr. Niklasson has worked in telecommunications, entry systems applications, heavy industry applications, and now automotive. He holds an MSc in Electrical Engineering from Chalmers University Technology alongside qualifications as a Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) and Scrum Master (PSM1) from Scrum.org; as an SEI Software Architecture Professional from Carnegie Mellon; and for the Foundation Level in Software Testing from ISTQB.org.